"Unbeknownst to the mayor..."

Since today is the exciting Family Day holiday at my new home, I had a chance to check in on the St. Louis Mayoral race just in time to hear about a press conference held this morning criticizing the Slay administration for requiring new workers to sign a form stating that their benefits could be taken away at any time.  Here's the form, first posted by progressive radio host Lizz Brown on her facebook page:

Some labor people I know on facebook thought it wasn't a big deal since it included the clause, "...unless otherwise agreed through the collective bargaining process" at the end of the document, but it was serious enough that Slay met with members of the St. Louis Labor Council this morning and promised to change the language.

In later stories on the subject, Slay's Chief of Staff Jeff Rainford gave plausible-ish sounding explanations of what happened, but even so, there was a quote from Rainford in the original KMOX story that seems to be extremely misleading at best and has yet to be explained.  When initially deflecting the story, Rainford told KMOX the forms were put in place without the mayor's knowledge:

“Unbeknownst to the mayor, the city counselor recommended that the personnel department ask new employees to sign that document.

Yet emails posted by Alderman Antonio French shows that Rainford, as well as other Slay employees Eddie Roth and Mary Ellen Ponder, were included in the email chain that specifically requested that the forms be implemented before the hiring of new employees:

Considering that Rainford was included in this email, at face value it looks like he was lying when he claimed this was "unbeknownst to the mayor."  At best, you could claim that maybe he wasn't lying-lying since Slay wasn't personally included on the email.  But for a chief of staff to try to deflect responsibility by saying the mayor didn't know about something while conveniently not mentioning that he personally did know about it is pretty outrageous, in my opinion.

Yet none of the later stories asked Rainford to explain why he claimed the mayor didn't know about the request, and based on past experience it's pretty unlikely that anyone in the St. Louis media ever will.